Did pornography cause the recession? According to the AP, the answer is: Probably! Over the last five years, the SEC has conducted 33 separate probes into "employees looking at explicit images"—explicit porno images. Let the "SEC/SEX" jokes begin!

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Twitter) asked SEC Inspector General David Kotz to write up a memo about all of the smut at the SEC, and then he leaked it. ABC News first reported the existence of the porn-hunt memo, revealing erotic stories like:

One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.

An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.

Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.

In one case, the report said, an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was denied access. When he used a flash drive, he successfully bypassed the filter to visit a "significant number" of porn sites.

So while Bernie Madoff was stealing your money and getting you fired, every single employee at the SEC was sitting in his/her fancy city office, touching himself/herself, pervertedly.

The Associated Press really got to the heart of the matter in their write-up of the story, which contains the following two sentences right next to each other:

The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.

Do you see what that means? Pornography literally created the recession. "Full-blown" panic, indeed!